Title: Lies I Tell Myself
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Spike/Wood
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Characters and situations belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. This is an episode-fic, based on Season 7: Lies My Parents Told Me.


Coming to Sunnydale a year ago, Robin Wood could never have imagined just how complicated his life would get. To some extent, complication had always been his mission in life, to find the action and take a big bite. He'd never known or wanted anything but the hunt, and before he was really old enough to understand the concept of Vengeance, the need to find the monster who'd killed his mother had consumed him. Her Watcher had raised him and trained him to be a soldier in the war that most humans didn't even know about but was always going on right under their noses; like some hero out of ancient mythology, Robin learned to kill vampires only to prepare himself to one day face his mother's killer. The subject of his revenge never had a recognizable face in the fantasies his mind played out over and over -- his role, his actions, were clear, but the killer was faceless, nameless. Robin clung to the thought that he would just know him, that the Powers would show him the monster the day he was ready to take him down.

How could Robin ever have imagined he would work alongside that monster for weeks after he'd learned his true identity? That he would let the vampire save his life in a dingy alleyway while he gripped his stake so tightly that he bled? He certainly never imagined that he would be entranced by Spike -- radiating sexuality like a pungent odor -- gliding away from him, that leather coat ripped from Robin's mother's dead shoulders billowing behind him like a magician's cloak. His every step cast a spell on Robin that tingled electricity down his skin and made his breath catch in his throat. Somewhere along the line his hatred for Spike had turned to obsession and melted smoothly into desire. Spike's eyes were the color of a morning sky he'd never see, his perfect cheekbones begged to be caressed, his slender lips enticing Robin to take them with his own. He waited still for his moment, but no longer knew what the moment was for. To take Spike down, or just to take him? He sucked in an unconscious breath as Spike shook his head at Robin's dumb hesitation and strolled confidently away. The vampire's slender fingers had the man's soul locked in a tight grip, and the arrogance in those blue eyes stirred up the rush of hatred deep inside him again.

The following night, after they tried using Giles' magical stone to make Spike his old self, Robin found that the time had come. He managed to convince Giles to keep Buffy away for a few hours so that he could do what was necessary for the greater good. For his own greater good, anyway -- the obsession had become unbearable, and he needed Spike to be his.

When he got the vampire to his workroom, the walls covered to the inch in crosses of every size and style, the fantasy he had worked out to the last detail began in real time. When he shut that door and flipped on the light switch, his normal self left the room and he became an actor, playing the part of Robin Wood, orphaned warrior, taking his vengeance at last. The final detail to the script had been added that day, so he played Spike's song-trigger and drew out the monster. He attacked; he followed the script.

But this time that rush of desire confused the script; he wasn't very clear on the motivations for he character. Every time he struck the vampire it meant less and yet more than it should have, like he was playing out some bizarre metaphor for homoerotic desire grounded in violence. He shoved his callused hand onto the other's carved cheek and pressed his face sizzling into the crosses on the wall, smoke rising from the wound. He turned Spike's face to his own, struck it one more time, and after another moment of hesitation, lunged in to devour those smooth lips with his own. Spike was still in vamp-face, and his fangs bit lightly into Robin's tongue as he rammed it sharply into his mouth. Robin's left hand, the one that wasn't shoving Spike's unbreathing throat to the smoking wall, roamed downwards of its own will and grabbed at Spike's denim-clad crotch. But there was no response. The vampire's cold cock, beneath layers of thick fabric, hung passively, as unresponsive as the empty yellow eyes staring beyond Robin's own. He was further from Robin at that moment than the imaginary nemesis had been for the last twenty-six years of Robin's short life. Suddenly enraged with frustration, he yanked Spike away from the wall and hurled him into the bookcase. Spike slid to the floor and lay staring at nothing, caught in his own Oedipal hallucination that had nothing to do with Robin's anger.

"Hurts, doesn't it?!"

Robin slammed his metal-clad fist over and over into Spike's face as he lay there, ignoring the beating Robin tried to give him. The demon's face cracked and bled. Robin begged Spike to feel the pain he was causing, the pain that would cleanse his own soul.

"Is this what it felt like, when you beat the life out of her?!"

Over and over. Slam. Bleed. Break the face that confused the clarity of his hatred and created his desire. There was no more desire; there was only pain.

"When you snapped her neck?!"

Robin didn't know what Spike was seeing behind those clouded yellow eyes, hidden by the ridges of his demon self; if he had taken a moment to think of it, he wouldn't have cared. He felt tears form and knew the time had come to finish the scene, to hurl the story towards its inevitably dusty ending. So he stepped calmly back. He pulled off the iron fists and slipped back into his respectable blue button-down. He said the lines he'd written in his head years ago, the lines he said to his mother's killer every night in his dreams. He ripped his mother's coat off Spike's limp back. He yanked a cross-shaped stake from the wall and slammed it downward into Spike's unbeating heart, feeling him explode into dust around his weary hands just like he'd always imagined.

But something went wrong. The stake's inevitable descent was stopped -- the vampire had finally decided to pay attention. Spike's deceptively strong grip had stopped Robin's wrist inches from his chest, and his now- human face stared directly back at Robin. His blue eyes looked into Robin's dark eyes, and somehow Robin knew Spike saw everything he was feeling. Once the vampire was paying attention, Robin was rudely reminded that he possesed only human strength. No matter how much training and preparation he had given himself, he was nowhere near a match for Spike's hundred-plus years experience combined with vampire strength. In moments, Spike stood over Robin's broken, bleeding body; the vampire was barely staggered by the minutes of beating Robin had given him. The man could barely raise his head to look at the vampire, and he was certainly not hearing what Spike was telling him. Something about Spike's mother. About Robin's mother. About Slayers. His brain processed the words fully enough to force tears from his tired eyes, but he didn't really hear them. All he knew was that he was beaten. He recognized what the vampire was telling him silently.

You're beneath me.

Broken, bleeding, beneath him, Robin heard Spike's last words.

"I've got my own free will. I just wanted you to know that. Before I kill you."

Cold hands hurled Robin against the wall and pinned him there; fangs penetrated his waiting flesh. He cried out in an agony that he knew was nowhere near ecstasy, but pretended that it was. Just to finish out the script. His vampire was taking him at last, and he tried to grind his hips against Spike's, desperate to feel any response. As before, there was none. He was nothing to Spike, just a passing meal. Beneath notice. He wept silently as his hands slid inside Spike's t-shirt and groped blindly at his cool flesh.

That he noticed. Spike pulled his teeth out of Robin's broken skin and stared at him, halfway between shock and contempt. Spike's face was human again, Robin's blood staining his lips and the fresh brand black and raw on his left cheek.

"That's what you really want from me, isn't it, Wood? And they say I'm screwed up. Trust me, I'm not where you'll find your closure. You've got to do that on your own."

He took several steps back; without Spike's hands supporting him, Robin slid slowly down to the floor.

"You're pathetic. And you're not even worth killing."

Spike's last words rang in Robin's ears as the vampire snatched the coat from the bookshelf and strode out of the room. Robin's eyes flooded with tears as he watched the monster depart, wearing arrogance like an impenetrable wall thicker and harder than black leather.